Seems like I still play more shows in Seattle than I do in Portland. Anyway, got a couple coming up in the Emerald City.

Friday, March 2nd Bonus is playing with Ribbons (Jherek Bischoff's new project of guitar/ukulele songs w/string quartet. Really good!) at Artworks, which is downtown near Pioneer Square/Pike Place. I forget the address. Not sure about time/cost but I'd guess around 9pm and about $5.

Then Saturday night March 3rd, I'll be participating in a fund-raiser at Gallery 1412 (1412 18th Ave. on Union) to support Jason Anderson and Beth Graczyk's upcoming Japanese tour. The performances will consist of ad-hoc groupings of music and dance improvisers. The participants will include:

Evidence is a new electronic piece I've just completed. I began work on it last year, put it away for a while, and recently went back to it and finished it. The idea for the piece was related to a 2003 piece I wrote for the Seattle Chamber Players called Premonitions. It was about space and silence, quietude, and putting emphasis on each sound event as a discrete unit. Also, in that piece I was trying to ask the question: What is the minimum amount of activity that can happen in a 10 minute piece of music and still hold one's attention?

Evidence was originally going to be basically an electronic version of Premonitions. In the end I decided that wasn't quite interesting enough to justify its own existence. The piece as it exists now relates to that piece, but through that piece it is investigating a different question: How much time can be spent in a given aesthetic mode before changing that mode calls the piece's identity and unity into question? How does overt contrast affect the listener's perception of a piece's identity after a significant amount of time? Is it still the same piece? Why or why not?

Almost all of the sounds are from samples of a casio sk1 keyboard on a trumpet patch, although the samples are truncated down to a microcosmic and then looped so that they just become pure electronic tones. The ending section of the piece also uses an idea I stole from Rhys Chatham's Echo Solo for piano: combining the use of just intonation and aleatoric processes, two seemingly mutually exclusive musical devices that I find work quite beautifully together, albeit in a very weird way.

I've been working on this video for a while, now. Thinking a lot about hockey. You know, as a sport. The ice, the puck, the fights. Then considering transposing this epic war-game down to a mini-scale. Looking at it from an outsider's perspective, while also trying to capture the inner reality of the game.